SIGN UP

Create an Inhabitat account

Sign up for weekly newsletter

I agree to receive emails from the site. I can withdraw my consent at any time by unsubscribing.

I agree to Ecouterre's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, and to the use of cookies described therein, and I also consent to the collection, storage, and processing of my data in the United States, where data protection laws may be different from those in my country.

Tiny, Clothing-Embedded Cameras Could Help Dieters Track Calories

When it comes to dieting, no one is very good at counting calories. In fact, we’re most likely to underestimate how much we’re actually eating. Not being able to count calories accurately is a serious detriment to our waistlines, but researchers out of Pittsburgh may have come up with a better way to help dieters keep track of it all. Clothing embedded with tiny cameras could be used to visualize and calculate how many calories a dieter is actually consuming. More-accurate information will not only lead to a better understanding of overall intake but also improve our health.

Think your burger and fries lunch is only 600 calories? It’s probably much higher than that, but as humans we are almost always wrong in “guestimating” how much we’re eating. Dieters who keep track of their food and log calories are way off the mark, which can have a major impact on their health and weight loss. It becomes even more serious when these dieters are struggling against chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. What we need is a way to take ourselves out of the picture and hand over the calorie tally to something that isn’t so emotionally invested.

Researchers out of the University of Pittsburgh are working on a computational method that will estimate your meal’s calories by using tiny cameras embedded into clothing. They recently published an article about their results in the Journal of Measurement Science and Technology. The cameras take a three-dimensional picture of the food and create a model of your meal. From this info, a computer can calculate the total caloric value of the meal. Dieters don’t have to worry about rough approximations. Plus, with more accurate information, they can make more informed decisions about how much food they actually should eat.